Making pigs fly

A friend expressed frustration with his company the other day. When I queried him about his frustration, he summed it up by saying that they had started to focus on “metrics over mission.”

In this particular example, concern for improving the lives of their customers is starting to take a back seat to short-term revenue targets and internally focused metrics. Newsflash: When you are focused inward, it means that your tush is facing the customer!

When you are not hitting the numbers that you aspire to, it is important to understand why before you start employing drastic actions to pump up the results. There are three possible reasons for missing numbers, and they all have different courses of action.

One, you might have a bad strategy. If your idea of what is important to your target audience is incorrect, you can scramble like a cat on a hot tin roof and execute perfectly but that won’t solve your problem. Tactics like new packaging, new sales techniques, new formulations and a Super Bowl add won’t get you there. There must be an addressable need and you must have a productive strategy to meet it. Innovation is more appropriate in this case than problem solving.

Secondly, you might have a viable strategy but be executing poorly. If performance falls off you need to identify what changed. If you are performing in some areas and not in others (e.g. geographically), it might be an execution problem. If performance has been eroding and the controllable variables have been held constant (e.g. staffing, compensation, sales, marketing, etc.) you might have changing market needs. See the previous paragraph.

Lastly, it might be that your expectations are out of whack. In my friend’s case, his company is trying to dramatically increase their growth rate. They are also changing their strategy (i.e. “what” they are doing to achieve their objectives), which you would expect if they want different results. Unfortunately, they are damaging the culture that made them successful in the first place and alienating those most responsible for the revenue stream. They have chosen metrics over mission.

Without correctly identifying the source of the problem, it is often the case that senior leadership will assume that their strategy is correct and that their metrics are achievable (because both came from senior leadership!) so it must be a problem of execution in the ranks.

Pushing hard to achieve numbers without evidence that your strategy is sound is like trying to make pigs fly by throwing them off of increasingly higher mountains. They still won’t fly, and it pisses off the pigs!